Last week, Microsoft released the seventh volume of its Security Intelligence Report, in which it outlined an increasing threat from malicious worms, the continued prominence of viruses and other malware coming from around the globe, and the rise of an “underground economy for the distribution and use of malware.” While malicious sofware continues to be a threat to computers everywhere, there may be some free market solutions to the problem that are going unused.
Among their many destructive aspects, viruses create a need for programmers to spend considerable time and resources on creating anti-virus programs when their talents could be put to use in other areas of computer programming. While such software has made it more difficult for the casual programmer to enter the computer virus arena, increasingly savvy Net criminals continue to adapt and create even more virulent malware.
Rather than engaging in a war of escalation between anti-virus software makers and virus creators, perhaps a better approach involves acknowledging a key part of the problem: the burden of preventing viruses falls largely on the individual, who, in many cases, is ill-equipped to understand and avoid threats on the Internet.
While some of this burden is mitigated by the free aforementioned anti-virus software and features built into current web browsers, there is another source of potential protection that is not being utilized – vigorous broadband competition. In a richly competitive markets, enhanced anti-virus protection would be an important product dimension upon which providers would compete. Internet service providers are inherently well suited to adopting this role, given their handling of myriad information that would help them target and fight harmful sites and malaware.
In many markets, however, a monopoly or duopoly of broadband providers mitigates the incentive to provide consumers with bolstered anti-virus protection. The result is some software that is usually bundled with the service, but doesn’t represent anything that is much better than what is offered in the software market.
Opening up broadband service competition can potentially serve as a channel to incentivize a stronger defense against virus programs and malware. Of course, this may not erradicate the problem completely, but given the additional benefits of competition, it wouldn’t hurt to try.
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